The Denialists’ Deck of Cards – denialism blogIt is well known that businesses spend billions of dollars on lobbyists to affect legislation. They also spend untold millions on public policy groups that spread doubt about the need for any type of reform.

Sign in to read: Living in denial: Why sensible people reject the truth From www.newscientist.com - March 14, 2013 HEARD the latest? The swine flu pandemic was a hoax: scientists, governments and the World Health Organization cooked it up in a vast conspiracy so that vaccine companies could make money.Never mind that the flu fulfilled every scientific condition for a pandemic, thatthousands died, or that declaring a pandemic didn't provide huge scope for profiteering. A group of obscure European politicians concocted this conspiracy theory, and it is now doing the rounds even in educated circles.This depressing tale is the latest incarnation of denialism, the systematic rejection of a body of science in favour of make-believe. There's a lot of it about, attacking evolution, global warming, tobacco research, HIV, vaccines - and now, it seems, flu. But why does it happen? What motivates people to retreat from the real world into denial?

Effects of Anti-Vaxxer Movement

A Disease Considered Eradicated in 2000 Is Now Sweeping the CountryFrom www.policymic.com - April 25, 2014 And it's even more infuriating when you learn why.But the CDC and other doctors say the reason the outbreak has been so huge is because of people who refused vaccinations. "As more parents decline to vaccinate their children, measles incidence is increasing — a fact that alarms me both as a hospital epidemiologist and as a parent of a vulnerable infant too young to receive the measles vaccine,"wrote epidemiologist Julia Shaklee Sammons in the Annals of Internal Medicine.Thanks to declining rates of vaccination, measles and other preventable diseases — which were essentially eradicated decades ago — are now making a comeback.

Measles returns: of vaccines and vacuous starletsFrom www.economist.com - January 30, 2015A rise in anti-vaccine sentiment has put everyone at risk... in 1963... there were around 400,000 cases of measles in America. In the decade to 2013 the average number of annual cases dropped below 100. The disease is no longer endemic in America (though it still kills thousands abroad). The measles vaccine, now combined with those for mumps and rubella, is safe and effective. Yet some parents believe the opposite and refuse to vaccinate their kids. Some adults go unprotected, too. They reflect a rise in anti-vaccine sentiment fuelled by misinformation and pseudoscience. This has coincided with an increase in the number of measles cases in America, which hit 644 last year (see chart).

How to Handle the Vaccine SkepticsFrom www.nytimes.com - February 8, 2015THE alarming number of measles cases — a record 644 last year, and 102 last month, the most since the disease was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000 — has focused scrutiny on parents who refuse vaccinations for their children. There are some who want state and local governments to sue, or even criminally charge, such parents. A bill in California would end all nonmedical exemptions to immunization requirements.